What are phrasal verbs?
- Phrasal verbs are expressions like ‘give up’ and ‘put up with’, made up of a verb together with one or more preposition or adverb.
What is difficult about phrasal verbs?
- The meaning of a phrasal verb is not always very clear if you look at the words that make it up. For example, if you give up smoking, you are not giving anything to anyone, and you are not putting anything ‘up’ either. It means ‘to stop smoking’.
- It can sometimes also be tricky to know where to put the object of a phrasal verb. Many are separable, which means that words like ‘it’ go in the middle. For instance, you can say, ‘give up smoking’ or ‘give it up’. But some are inseparable. For instance, you can say, ‘Your tie goes with your shirt’ or ‘it goes with it’.
Why should I learn and use more phrasal verbs?
- There are thousands of phrasal verbs in English. You can even buy dictionaries made up entirely of them. Of these, a few hundred are very common in everyday English and are really essential to know and use if you want your English to be natural.
- You have probably picked up a lot of phrasal verbs already, but it may be that at school you focused on more formal English, so that you have some gaps. Also, if you speak another European language, you may be tempted to use a word like ‘confess’ or ‘return’ which has a direct equivalent in your language, rather than the more common phrasal verbs which English speakers use to express these meanings (‘own up’ and ‘get back’).
Activities
Following are supporting activities and tests for phrasal verb usage. Work through the activities, which support the information presented in the previous guides.
